Denton, Melinda Lundquist

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Denton, Melinda Lundquist

PERSONAL:

Education: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Ph.D. candidate.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 155 Hamilton Hall, CB #3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

National Study of Youth and Religion, project manager.

WRITINGS:

(With Christian Smith) Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (nonfiction), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

As project manager for the National Study of Youth and Religion, Melinda Lundquist Denton joined with Christian Smith, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, to perform an extensive survey of young Americans' attitudes toward faith. They published their findings in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.

Their study, funded by the Lilly Endowment, took place from 2001 to 2005. It involved randomly surveying 3,290 thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds and their parents by telephone, and also conducting 267 in-person interviews in forty-five states. Seventy-five percent of the teens identified themselves as Christian.

Denton and Smith found that the youths in general respected organized religion, enjoyed going to services, and saw their parents as primary—and welcome—religious influences. Various stereotypes of young people—as religiously apathetic, drawn to alternative faiths, or spiritual rather than religious—did not fit their respondents. The authors also found, however, that the teens were vague about specific beliefs. "The de facto dominant religion among contemporary U.S. teenagers," they write, "is what we might well call ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.’" According to the authors, teens believe in God as creator and custodian of the world, but they do not see a need for humans to involve themselves with God except when seeking help. They believe God wants people to behave well toward one another and to be happy, and they believe heaven will welcome all good people. These beliefs were present to some degree, the authors note, among Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, and nonreligious teens.

They express hope that their findings will cause religious leaders and congregations to discuss how to reach young people, and they recommend that religious organizations recognize that teens are capable of developing "serious, articulate, confident, personal and congregational faith." Adults, the authors say, should cease thinking of teens as "alien creatures" or "a social problem."

Several reviewers deemed Soul Searching a significant work that provides solid information, debunks popular assumptions about youths, and challenges religious institutions to do better by them. Denton and Smith "have conducted the most comprehensive and reliable research ever done on youth and religion," commented Carol E. Lytch in the Christian Century. A Publishers Weekly critic described the book as "encyclopedic in scope and exhaustive in detail," adding that it "advances the conversation about contemporary adolescent spirituality." Some other observers thought that conversation needed to be advanced. "In the historic absence of collective common sense on the subject of teens," related Andrew Greeley in the National Catholic Reporter, "Soul Searching is an important book."

One reason for its importance, Greeley said, is that it "demolishes the conventional wisdom—which is one of the things that good social science is supposed to do. Granted that there are some angry, alienated, neopagan rebellious teens who reject all religion, the majority are not all that different from their parents and seem to be drifting in the direction of being religious adults much like their parents." In a similar vein, Andy Crouch remarked in Christianity Today, the authors' findings "overturn nearly every piece of conventional wisdom about teens and faith. There is no generation gap…. The baby-boomer ethos of adolescent rebellion has disappeared—if, indeed, it ever was so widespread as the media would have us believe." Likewise, Lytch noted: "Smith and Denton's most striking finding is that teens are traditional."

Lytch went on to praise the authors for offering advice on how to move teens past a traditional but nebulous faith. "They say that parents should be more interested and involved in youth ministry and that parents and faith communities should more forthrightly teach youth their distinctive beliefs and practices," she observed. Other commentators also thought the book would have extensive practical applications. "For that residue of Catholics who are concerned about future generations," Greeley concluded, "Soul Searching is a mustread." Crouch summed it up by saying: "No book in recent memory has as much potential to transform the practice of youth ministry."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, December, 2005, P.J. Hayes, review of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, p. 679.

Christian Century, September 6, 2005, Carol E. Lytch, "What Teens Believe," pp. 20-21.

Christianity Today, April, 2005, Andy Crouch, "Compliant but Confused: Unpacking Some Myths about Today's Teens," p. 98.

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, January, 2007, review of Soul Searching, p. 63.

National Catholic Reporter, December 16, 2005, Andrew Greeley, "The Spiritual Life of Teens in America: Study Finds That the Catholic Church Does a Poor Job of Attending to Its Youth," p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, January 24, 2005, review of Soul Searching, p. 238.

Washington Post Book World, July 10, 2005, Hannah Rosin, "It's the Deity, Dude," p. 8.